We get it — hospitals are crawling with germs. If it’s not your cell phone, the doctor’s coat or even the hands-free water faucet, then it’s the privacy curtain around the bed that’s tainted with unwanted bacteria.

When it comes to seeking care for a heart attack, speed is everything. The faster you get to the hospital, the likelier you are to stay alive and minimize lasting heart damage. Not everyone, however, acts on that wisdom the same …

The cycle of life pays little heed to Mother Nature. Snowdrifts and icy roads? Babies don’t care. Across the country, they defied the massive snowstorm and kept coming, with the help of firetrucks, ambulances, Humvees and, in …

Psychologists and psychiatrists tend to hate each other. The reasons are historical: beginning even before Freud, psychologists held enormous power over the cultural imagination. The whole idea of psychiatry — an explicitly …

Earlier this year, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that included more than 7,000 patients from eight hospitals around the world, found that implementing the use of surgical checklists reduced patient mortality rates by half, and patient injuries by nearly a third. Now, a new study published online in the British …

Transferring the care of a patient from one physician to another is a standard—and necessary—part of hospital care. Yet, among trainee doctors, important information often gets overlooked during these hand-offs, according to a new study published in the March issue of the journal Pediatrics. Researchers at the University of Chicago …

For brain surgery patients, a doctor’s bedside exam is still superior to a routine CT scan for identifying potential post-surgical complications, according to a study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery. Researchers from the Department of Neurological Surgery at Loyola University in Chicago examined the records of 251 patients who …

In hospital settings, disinfectants are regularly used to prevent the spread of bacteria and prevent infection, but a new study published in the January issue of the journal Microbiology, suggests that too much exposure to a disinfectant may actually cause harm by creating bacteria that can not only resist the cleaning product, but some …